Steve Garvey’s New Field of Dreams

Maybe the oddest thing about Steve Garvey’s squirrelly U.S. Senate bid is how long it took him to run—about 50 years. Ross Newhan, the Hall of Fame baseball writer, summing up Garvey’s 1974 season with the Los Angeles Dodgers, wrote at the time that “Garvey’s year was best characterized by wife Cyndy, who was doing chores at the couple’s new home in Calabasas, [California], when she learned of Steve’s selection” as league Most Valuable Player. “‘When you think about the kind of year Steve had, it’s too bad you can’t shoot it, stuff it, and put it in a corner to show off for all time,’” Cyndy said, conjuring an image so weird and vivid it makes you wonder just how often the Garveys were talking at home about his big post-baseball future.

Steve and Cyndy Garvey, a Ken-and-Barbie handsome “it” couple, were not subtle about their striving—or his plans to run for office as a Republican. “Garvey said he was hopeful that the award would help him with his bids to maintain a healthy image for baseball and restore the athlete to a position of eminence rather than a status of anti-hero,” Newhan wrote at a time when many still vividly recalled incidents like two American medalists raising their black-gloved fists in Black Power salutes on the podium at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City in 1968.

Garvey, setting himself up as Mr. Clean, would talk about his “beautiful wife” and his “beautiful family” whenever he could and cast aspersions on fellow players (with their “playboy image”). Although Garvey dominated the 1974 World Series, leading the Dodgers with a torrid .381 batting average, his team lost to Oakland, and he chirped. “Probably the thing I’m most proud of was the birth of my daughter (Krisha) during the World Series.”

The “Mr. Clean” image, however, quickly broke down. Steve and Cyndy Garvey would soon divorce. She penned a 1981 tell-all about being yoked to a controlling, philandering husband. The book’s readers included Nicole Simpson, O.J. Simpson’s wife, who was found slain in 1994. The camera caught a copy on her shelves as the investigation into her husband’s role unfolded.

Today, Garvey’s daughter echoes Cyndy’s charges that Steve was no father of the year. The Los Angeles Times caught up with Krisha in February, who told the newspaper that her celebrity dad “cut off almost all contact without explanation about 15 years ago in a move that she still finds painful.”

Krisha “said she is not active in politics but agreed to speak to The Times about what she characterized as ‘complete abandonment’ of herself and her three children by her father because she felt it was important for voters to understand that her father’s public image hasn’t always reflected his personal life. ‘There’s something lacking in him, something not authentic,’ she said. ‘To be a man of the people, to truly have experience of being a totally complete, loving family man … I wouldn’t want the people of California to buy into that just because he hit a ball really well.’”

Plenty of professional athletes have cheated on their wives and been distant, unreliable fathers—but few have held themselves up as paragons of virtue the way Garvey has long done, and fewer still have tried to parlay that image into elective office.

Not so long ago, a devastating piece of reporting like the Los Angeles Times article would have spelled the end of Garvey’s candidacy for the open U.S. Senate seat once held by Dianne Feinstein, but Garvey’s poll ratings actually improved. How was this possible? Some of it could be an age-of-Trump thing. If a man found liable for sexual assault is marching toward the Republican nomination, why can’t a bad dad pick up a GOP Senate nod?

Here is the thing: Garvey’s Senate bid is a run for rehabilitation. He knows as well as anyone that blue California isn’t going to elect him. He’s running for the publicity. That’s why he doesn’t even feign at knowing substance—a rite of passage for famous Californians who have sought to turn celebrity status into political office going back to author Upton Sinclair, actors Helen Gahagan Douglas (who Richard Nixon defeated in 1950), Ronald Reagan, Sonny Bono, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Garvey’s Senate bid is like Jay Gatsby’s only-for-show library. His website isn’t the ideal showcase for a typical politician. It’s more like a clearing house for baseball memorabilia; you can almost smell the horsehide.

I met Garvey in 2004. I was helping the former Oakland Athletics star, Jose Canseco, write a book. Canseco met me at LAX, and we drove to Phoenix, where he’d be signing baseball cards at one of those fan fairs that help former athletes keep a little cash rolling in. This was third-tier card show stuff all the way—as depressing, dreary, and pointless as some post-Beckett alternate theater production.

Blinking from the desert sun, we entered a nearly empty, low-slung warehouse-like structure. Only a few wizened former major leaguers were there, including the sad-eyed fellow one booth over—Garvey, who was then in his fifties. “He needs the money,” Canseco stage-whispered to me.

Now Garvey gets to enjoy cheering crowds once again. The beauty is that he doesn’t even have to make any sense on camera, a standard the media once enforced on the likes of Reagan or Schwarzenegger. Announcing his candidacy in October 2023, Garvey told a local TV interviewer: “I think California has been a malaise. Nobody really wants to step up and fight the good fight. They know how daunting it is, and I said, well, maybe I can ask a few questions.”

Politics is often about setting low expectations, and on that scale, Garvey went into the three televised Senate debates with the bar so low he almost couldn’t go wrong. (California has a so-called jungle primary where candidates from both parties compete to finish first or second to be on the fall ballot.) Yet he still struck out.

As San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jack Ohman cracked, “Describing Garvey’s performance as a deer in the headlights is a disservice to actual deer in headlights.”

Garvey twice voted for Trump, which is significant baggage in a state that overwhelmingly opposes him, and he won’t say whether he will support him in 2024, which was not a smart evasion but just a whiff. Better just to say, “I’m not voting for Biden,” and then, “I’m going to support the Republican nominee.” No wonder Representative Katie Porter quipped, “Once a Dodger, always a dodger.” She’d go on to come in third.

Garvey claims to disagree with the Republican Party on “just about everything” but was remarkably short on specifics, leading The New York Times to observe after the first debate that Garvey’s performance “was painful to witness on Monday. Mr. Garvey, who has never held public office, insisted he had taken ‘strong positions’ on border control and policing but that he was ‘new’ and ‘needed to explore California.’” This is from someone who has lived here since 1969.

Garvey easily advanced out of the March primary along with Schiff, who had slyly promoted Garvey’s candidacy to avoid a fall election against Porter, which might have been competitive and would certainly have been a money-burning internecine Democratic battle. Like Peter Sellers in the famous film about a dim man who becomes a celebrity, Garvey won by “Being There.” (“There will be growth in the spring!” one can almost hear Garvey echoing.)

No credible analyst thinks Garvey has any shot at winning the Senate seat, currently held by Laphonza Butler, who was appointed to the post by Governor Gavin Newsom after Feinstein died in September and who declined to run for a full term. As former California Republican Party political director Mike Madrid (who I’ve helped on writing projects), author of The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy, points out, “I think the most interesting tidbit is Garvey is leaning on his name ID with the Dodger fan base, but today’s Dodger fan base is the most Latino in the MLB and the most anti-Trump. The transformation of the demographics of Los Angeles captures why Republicans haven’t been competitive since Garvey was last in uniform.” It’s true. Had Garvey sought office during the Reagan presidency or in the 1990s when the state was still electing Republicans statewide, he might have been a contender. His chances are as good as Colin Kaepernick’s running in West Virginia.

Garvey won’t be a senator but will be better off because of this race. He’ll have some more speaking engagements and media interest. Hell, if next year brings another Trump administration, the ex-Dodger might even get sent to Monaco or the Maldives as ambassador. 

Garvey’s political rise, if that’s what we call this, deserves scrutiny mostly as yet another indication of a growing trend, the all-image, zero-substance, quasi-celeb candidacy to which the established laws of political gravity do not apply. It would be a step up. Garvey was not one of those athletes who moved seamlessly into the anchor booth or the C-Suite. It’s not surprising that he doesn’t talk much about his work life since he hit a ball for a living because there’s not much to discuss—infomercials, some work giving motivational talks to corporations, generally cashing in on his years with the Dodgers and San Diego Padres. A good-looking star athlete from a top media market should have been able to do better than signing cards in an Arizona warehouse.

Garvey seems remarkably lazy as a candidate. He keeps his campaign schedule as free of actual events as possible and lets name recognition do the work; if he were to win, he’d be as shocked as the rest of us.

Not to be unkind, but as a reporter who interviewed Clint Eastwood in 1986 when he was mayor of Carmel, the gorgeous coastal town near Monterey, an hour from where I now live in Santa Cruz, and Sonny Bono in 1988 before he was elected mayor of Palm Springs, Garvey doesn’t seem in their league. Eastwood got involved in local politics because he wanted to get things done. Bono told me in 1985 that he was “definitely the anti-establishment candidate. It’s kind of ironic. It’s like 1965 again”—an allusion to his fringed vest and fur boots days with Cher. But as I wrote for Newsday then, Bono’s “stand on the issues has impressed the community enough that other candidates have started to echo his rhetoric.” Eastwood was a decent enough municipal leader, and Bono had a good run as both a chief executive of a booming city and as a moderate Republican in Newt Gingrich’s House of Representatives before tragically dying in a ski accident in 1998. His political brand was solid enough that his widow, Mary, carried his seat for several terms after his untimely demise.

When Schwarzenegger was our governor, we laughed because why not? But the Austrian-born muscleman worked hard as a candidate to clear the field. While he wasn’t quite the fiscal disciplinarian and reformer he promised, he did some good things, like revamping redistricting and making a case that environmental policies were important. Leaders needed to make them “hip and sexy” to win broad support. Ronald Reagan put a much bigger stamp on the Golden State when he finished his second term in 1974 and was succeeded by Jerry Brown, son of Reagan’s predecessor, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, then the youngest governor in the state’s history who would go on to become its oldest during his second tour in the office 2011-2019.

Like Bono, Schwarzenegger, Reagan, and even Donald Trump, Garvey is not an ideologue. He’s owned a home in the Palm Springs area since 2006 and seems to have no particular issue with it going from being a Rat Pack hangout in the Swinging Sixties to a gay mecca today. No one thinks of him as especially religious or having had a come-to-Jesus political moment like other California celebrity Republicans. Sonny Bono traced his rightward drift to being a restaurateur dealing with meddlesome government regulations about his business’s bathroom tiling, and Reagan famously moved from New Deal Democrat to Goldwater Republican over high tax rates on his Hollywood earnings and Communists in the Screen Actors’ Guild, which he headed. Garvey’s Republicanism is more like Trump’s—an affiliation that keeps him in the spotlight and some cash rolling in. Sadly, Garvey’s brief turn as a Reagan or Schwarzenegger wannabe will end in about seven months when he concedes to Schiff. He’ll never co-sign legislation. He will surely go back to signing baseballs.